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Best Games - Final Fight There were side scrolling beat ‘em up games before Final Fight. Capcom didn’t invent the genre. That honor should probably go to Technos and the Kunio-kun series. The Technos game Double Dragon may have even been the first game to truly nail walking right and punching. Those games are great too, and I will probably get to them at some point, but this write up is about Final Fight. First, let's talk about the characters. The bigness of the characters. Can you imagine, walking into an arcade in 1990 and seeing a lot of games with little characters or planes or spaceships, and then you look over and there are these positively giant men of this one screen just punching the crap out of each other? It’s not only a couple of dudes, either. The screen is full of huge men and women. All of them are punching and kicking and flipping. There have been some big guys on screens before Final Fight. Some of the guys on Double Dragon are pretty big. Nothing like this though. The guys on screen in Final Fight are enormous. They are detailed and vibrant in a way that’s still pretty shocking to look at today.
Just look at that. Also, that door has DICK written on it.
Big, glorious sprites are great and all, but if the game doesn’t play well, it really doesn’t matter how pretty it is. This is a developer that is one iteration away from creating Street Fighter II, inarguably one of the best fighting games ever made. While games like Streets of Rage, and subsequent brawler games, might feel as good or even better than Final Fight, at the time when it was released, Final Fight had the fastest, most precise, most solid feeling hand to hand combat that had ever graced an arcade machine. Characters punch and kick almost as fast as you can press the buttons. There are a small set of special moves for each character, and some unique joystick and button inputs. A combination of speed, animation, and sound effects make punches and kicks feel like they land. Sprites don’t just overlap or pass through each other, they hit. It’s all an illusion, but it’s a satisfying one. Other developers would go on to make better, faster, more complicated brawlers in the years after Final Fight, but this is the game that gave those other teams permission. This is the one that paved the way. It’s so beloved that most, if not all, characters from Final Fight have made appearances in other Capcom games, several of them showing up as playable characters in the Street Fighter series. Final Fight is one of the best games, and that door just has DICK written on it.
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While I can’t post the stories that came out of the writing jam thing I did for the last six weeks, I can put up my postmortem wrap up on how the whole thing went for me. I’ve done a few edits to remove spoilers and such.
Without the stories to go with them, this set of write-ups might not have a lot of context, but I think there is enough of the process of going from idea to story, that it might be interesting for some people. -- I’ve only recently joined Codex. I don’t really know anyone here, and no one knows me, so I’ve been fairly quiet. When I saw that this contest/story jam was happening, I jumped at it. I’m glad I did. I’ve had fun coming up with new stories every week. I normally work much slower. I think at least 3 out of the 6 can be made into something good. I waffle between which 3 that might be on an hourly basis. I’m still fairly quiet, and I’ll probably stay that way for a while, but interacting with a few of you during this was nice. I’ve never done anything like this for writing before, and I’ve never attempted Flash length, but I have participated in a lot of game jams. For better or worse, I approached WW in much the same way. Arrive each week as blank a slate as I can, and say yes to the ideas as they come. I hadn’t really considered the scores (and to be completely honest, I don’t think I understood the competition format of WW until about week 3), so those didn’t really factor into what I chose to write. The comments, on the other hand, were great. Almost all the criticisms of my stories I found myself agreeing with, especially if they were pointing out something I cut or wish I could have added or clarified. Others were pointing out something I hadn’t considered or didn’t know might be a stumbling block for readers, and those are always immensely helpful. So, thank you. I hope to use all of that and get these stories out into the wild, where all stories belong. Week 0 Title - Know thy Enemy, Know thyself Prompt - Are you familiar with the works of Sun Tzu? Fun fact about me. Before I switched to art and animation, I studied poli sci. I read, wrote about, and talked about a lot of ‘classics in political thought’, Sun Tzu among them. As a result of all that reading, I might have a different take on these writings. I’m usually pretty baffled by the typical business bro take on the likes of Machiavelli, Musashi, or Sun Tzu. I think it might be fair to say that many of them have read these books and misinterpreted them badly. One fun direction to take a game jam prompt is to go absolutely, painfully, literal. I figured that might be fun, since the characters in my story were going to be blissfully unaware of nuance or irony. I think the result is something sort of fun and goofy, but not the kind of story I could expand or refine into anything worthwhile. It’s sort of a skit. It was a silly thing and a fun warm up, but I can’t imagine taking it much further than that. Week 1 Title - Tortoises Prompt - Break Something This prompt made me think, what if you fixed something so hard that you broke it? What if that something was a person? This led to wild thoughts of immortality and the mental consequences of dealing with that much time. I considered the counter to that. A group of people that had become, or had been created, immortal. The spawned mind is a person that can’t conceive of its own end. Linear time is an inconvenient part of existing, but they don’t understand mortality. They are young (perpetually?) and inquisitive. So the story is an eternal child trying to understand an eternally old man trying to understand a very old tortoise. Each of them trying to deal with time in their own way, and none of them ever being able to truly connect. I think I managed to capture a bit of what I was going for in 750 words, but this is a story that needs a little more room. I’ll be reworking it and filling out the character of the spawned mind a bit more to establish how completely alien the characters are to one another, while still being recognizable as human. This was probably my most evenly successful story for readers. I think the parts I had to cut (about 500 words) didn’t harm the flow of it too badly, but several comments hit on things that I left ambiguous only because the passages that clarified them had been cut. This story has already grown a bit, but it will probably top out around 2000 words or so. Week 2 Title - So Much More Than Magic Prompt - “all adventures, especially into new territory, are scary.” Sally Ride I batted around a few of the prompts this week, but Sally Ride’s quote stuck with me. Sally Ride was, above all else, a scientist. That made me think, what’s a more frightening adventure than changing the way you think. How you ask questions. The transition from knowing that the world works one way and then being shown that there might be a new way to look at it. A way with more questions than established answers. At least it might be frightening at the start. I don’t think I succeeded with the way I wrote this story. After I posted it, I thought of so many revisions and refinements. Things to remove, things to add. I think I will be able to pull this one together, but it might take a few passes. This one came in right at the bottom of my group for the week. That was a little disheartening, until I read the comments. The parts that I wanted to hit seemed to be hitting, but the cuts I had to make to stuff it all down to size were just too harsh. Many of the comments cited things that I had cut to an almost eerie degree of specificity. It was probably pretty obvious those parts were missing. I think my main failure here was properly scoping the story and pace to the constraints. Week 3 Title - Zero Regrets for the Apocalypse (rummage sale title) Prompt - What’s the strangest thing you have ever eaten? I looked at the prompts. Nothing stuck. I spun through the title rummage sale. Nothing kicked off any ideas. As soon as I put the prompts in one window and the titles in another, the two parts of this story snapped together. What if someone ate the moon? And they loved it. They wanted more, even if that means an apocalypse, everyone else be damned. When making the decision between personal desire and potential annihilation, what if a seemingly good person chose desire. It’s not that hard to imagine. It happens all the time. We all do it constantly. Maybe this is an allegory, maybe this is just a goofy, absurdist story. Maybe it’s both. Most people seemed to be on board with this story. Others, not so much. I don’t think it’s a much larger story, probably still flash, but I think there is an audience for it. I’m going to do some more work on it to find out. Week 4 Title - Excerpts from the notes of Lance Corporal Thomas Dusanne Prompts - Open a book randomly and find the second paragraph - and - you discover a family secret I had been thinking about writing in an epistolary format, simply because I have never tried that before. Discovering a family secret, or long-lost document, seemed to fit the bill. I was still floundering a bit so I tried the Open a Book prompt and stumbled onto a date in 1915. Add a dash of can-con and some horror elements and I was off and running. I did a lot of research for this one, read and listened to many letters and notebooks of Canadian soldiers from WWI, and wrote several other passages that I had to cut. I will be adding those back, because honestly it flows better with them. This seemed to land very well with some people, and not so well with others. A few people picked up on some of the parts I thought might be too subtle, so that’s good. Something about this story is telling me that it wants to be a comic. I’m looking into making that happen. Week 5 Title - After Hours at JD’s Salvage Yard Prompt- Who is the strongest person? I think the strongest person is one who continues on in the face of adversity. One who retains their joy even when it would be easier to let it go. Sometimes the strongest people are strong because they have help. This story started out as an action packed arm wrestling scene between mechs. I didn’t get very far in before all I wanted to do was examine what sort of person would do that. I shifted everything over to a very simple scene where I could get to know Zenon. A lot of readers in my division didn’t like this story (scene) very much, and that’s completely okay. If you are reading this, and you didn’t like it, that’s fine. I didn’t write it for you. I wrote it for me. I like to write these scenes to get to know my characters, and if everything goes well, I can start to like them. Zenon and JD will absolutely become characters in a new story, but it probably won’t be this one. It might involve mech arm wrestling, and it might not, but it will be about dudes being good to each other. Even though the world around them might be a bit grimy, the story will be joyful. I’ve started to put together what shape this new story will take. A few times on here, I have taken a little time to point out some graphics tools I like. Recently, it’s just been a bunch of different ways to use Blender. I started using Blender for some stuff that I don’t think it was really intended for, but it doesn’t seem to care. Just chews right through those graphics.
This time, it’s not Blender. This time I’m going to write something about Pixel Composer ( https://makham.itch.io/pixel-composer ) There are about a million pixel art tools. Aseprite( https://www.aseprite.org/ ) is probably the current darling, and it’s easy to see why. It does a lot. You can paint, edit, and animate with really intuitive tools. On the other hand, Aseprite is more a refinement of the sort of tools we have been using for computer graphics for decades now than it is something new or revolutionary. Most of the time, that’s what people want. A tool that is dialed in for their particular task. Pixel Composer isn’t that. It’s a different sort of animal. Pixel Composer is more like programming pixel art pipelines than a traditional art tool. You string together a network of processes with whatever your input art is at one end, and some animated, distorted, or created pixel art comes out the other end. It has a lot more in common with procedural video compositing systems than it does with something like photoshop. It doesn’t seem to be the best tool for every task, but it does make some workflows possible that would be very difficult without it. I suppose you could wrangle Blender into doing that sort of thing for you, but, try as I might, Blender can’t be the tool for every job. So, five weeks of writing flash stories, and I now have at least 3 good starts to stories I might be able to sell. I don’t think any of them work the way I want in the form they are in now, but writing sellable flash stories was never my intent. I sort of just wanted to see if I could do it. If a few extra stories fall out the other end, well that would be nice too.
I hadn’t put it down here before, because it felt weird or braggy or something else, but after thinking about it, I don’t know that it is. A few months ago, I applied to join Codex. Codex is a forum and community of neo-pro writers. People who have sold a few stories or completed certain writing courses. Some are full time professional writers, some are part time, or very part time, but all are more serious than hobby level. At least one person there is selling a story or a book ever few days. Dedicated discussions and resources on the ins and outs of professional writing (think basic contract and tax stuff) are almost as common as those on craft and technique. It’s a place where writers hang out. I think I felt weird about talking about it, because I don’t often feel like a writer. I’m a commercial artist that sometimes pretends to be a writer. Fairly soon after I applied, they started running their yearly flash fiction contest. It’s like a series of writing jams. All the writers are given a set of prompts, and a 48 hour deadline. You need to come up with an idea based on one (or a few) of the prompts and then execute it in under 750 words in under two days. I am quite familiar with game jams, so the vibe is similar. It’s a contest in the same way that Ludum Dare is a contest. There will be a ‘winner’ but no one outside codex will know or care, and there aren’t really prizes. Well, maybe there are. The real prize, for me anyway, is that over a dozen other writers will read, comment on, and rate your work every week. I have a story published in a literal paper book and I couldn’t tell you if a dozen people have actually read it. If they have, they certainly never told me about it. These stories are all short enough that anyone can buzz through several of them in a sitting. Little 750 word stories. That’s the first prize, the second prize is that I will read more than a dozen (probably over 2 dozen) stories every week. I am getting a lot of exposure to what works and what doesn’t in these short bursts. I suppose the aggravating part is, almost none of the stories I have read in the last few weeks have been bad. Some of them are so outrageously good that I can hardly believe they were written in less than two days. I take that back. It’s not aggravating, it’s inspiring. In an aggravating way. The scores and comments on my own stories have been mixed to slightly favourable. Every week at least one person selected my story as one of their favourites for that round, and every one of them has received a couple of 8 or higher scores. That might not sound great, but trust me, if you read these stories, being anywhere in the top half is extremely flattering. The stories are good, and some folks grade extremely harshly. There are at least half a dozen that I have read that can probably be sold, as is, with no edits. These people are that good. I just submitted my story for this week. I think it’s okay, but we’ll see. I think it would be better if it were longer than 750 words. |
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